After war, the terrible peace

Alice Thomson in southern Iraq looks at the plight of Basra's hospitals

12:01AM BST 19 May 2003

On the first day back at school after the war, Ali Hussein Mugamis ran out into the playground and saw a shiny metal object. He remembers nothing else. As the 12-year-old lies in Basra Public Hospital in southern Iraq, a doctor is telling his father that the four fingers of one hand have been amputated, that there is shrapnel in his brain and thighs, and that it may not be possible to save one of his legs.

On the ward, the doctor points to another boy whose leg has become gangrenous. "Better safe than sorry," he explains, although there is no anaesthetic left and the operation will be expensive.

Suddenly, from outside, we hear the terrible sound of wailing. A patient runs in to say that nine boys have been killed and seven wounded while playing with an Iraqi rocket. Like many Iraqis, they were probably planning to take out the fuel and sell it for use in cooking stoves.

On the other side of town, at the mothers and children hospital, it is water rather than old military hardware that is killing children. Parents are forced to beg for basic rehydration sachets to treat chronic diarrhoea.

Mustafa is 18 months old; since catching a stomach bug six weeks ago, he has eaten no solids. The area where he lives has had no running water for nearly two months; he is now suffering several epileptic fits a day. His mother has stood by his bedside all this time, guarding one of the few remaining drips. Everyone in Basra is terrified of cholera.

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Back in Kuwait, two dozen television camera crews have lined up to capture the first tentative steps of Ali Ismaeel Abas, the boy who lost both his family and his arms in an allied bombing raid. But Ali was airlifted to safety from Baghdad - and he remains an exception.

Relatively few people were killed and injured in the war; it is the aftermath - the unexploded ordnance, the lack of water and electricity, the sewage spewing out around the cities - that is terrifying people in the south. Looters have ransacked the water and sewage plants, often taking even the bricks.

This comes on top of three wars, 24 years of dictatorship and 12 years of sanctions. More than 80 per cent of the population were dependent on hand-outs from the oil for food programme, and most were employed by the government.

For two months these people have received no food or salaries. Now the only currency is the corrugated iron torn from the roofs of government buildings, the light bulbs pilfered from schools and the sinks from orphanages - all sold for knock-down prices on the looters' market.

The aid agencies say we are witnessing a humanitarian disaster, and Unicef has launched its largest appeal, asking for £167 million.

An entire country is living on the brink. The problems start as you cross the border from Kuwait. Desperate farmers have shot holes in the main aqueduct from Basra, tapping the water every few hundred yards.

Locals with donkey carts, children and goats are all helping themselves, swimming in puddles in the desert. By the time the water reaches the town of Safwan it is a trickle. At the health clinic there is not enough left to make a glass of tea.

Unicef already has 67 tankers coming from Kuwait each day, filled with water, but these service less than 10 per cent of the local population. Further down the road an ice factory has been looted and people are carting off chunks for their families.

Before we enter Basra, Jubbar Al Haiday, the former chief engineer of Basra's water department, takes us to one of the pumping stations. He is crying quietly as he wades through the devastation. Every bolt and screw has been taken, the wiring has been stripped out - even the tiles in the lavatory have been prised off. "I have no workers left. I am paying guards out of my own savings," he says. Forty per cent of Basra still has no water.

With him is the director of the sewage department, Maitham Jarella Saboom, who has 116 sewage pumping stations. Less than a third are working. He recently discovered a group of looters using a stolen crane to lift the roof off a water treatment plant. Of his 200 workers only 10 have turned up for work since the war.

Their cars and lorries have been stolen, and they are too scared to carry their tools with them on their carts. "I have no desk in my office, no chair, no records - yet they ask me to stop cholera breaking out," he says.

He takes us to a water treatment plant surrounded by miles of hardened sewage, cracking under the sun. There are children running over it. The sewage director explains that they have only one week's chlorine left to disinfect the water for five million people in the south.

The locals claim that the armed forces have taken it for their swimming pools, but it is the British who have supplied Mr Saboom with what little he has.

The consequences of the lack of clean water are most apparent in the Ibu Ghazuau hospital for mothers and children in Basra. Here, the wards are crammed with children suffering from diarrhoea, most of them being held in their mothers' arms until a bed becomes available.

Zaira is eighteen months old. Her family comes from the Iran/Iraq border, which is littered with depleted uranium tips. Her mother tells us that she suffered six miscarriages before having Zaira - her only child - who has congenital deformities. The baby became so ill that she refused to breastfeed, so her mother gave her powdered baby milk - and now Zaira has diarrhoea and violent stomach cramps.

In the cancer ward children lie limply on their beds. There are no therapies for them, only pain killers. Unicef hands out milk powder, nutritional biscuits and basic drugs.

Dr Abd Al Kareen Subber, the consultant gynaecologist, takes us to the maternity wards. "We have no ultrasound, no monitoring of labour," he explains.

He is visiting two sisters from the countryside. One went into labour the day the war ended. After two days of agony, she realised that she must reach a hospital - but she had no transport. "By the time she arrived, her uterus had burst," says the doctor. "The child died, but I think we will save her." He has just performed a caesarean on her sister-in-law, who is clutching her new baby.

In the premature babies unit there are still four incubators. The babies are so tiny that the smallest nappies reach their chins. They have no tubes on them - they were all stolen.

"We lost 48 out of 92 premature babies in April. Those that survived did so without the aid of oxygen - one made it through on black, sugary tea.

"We have few nurses left. Most avoid the premature unit: they are frightened of staying on the isolation wards alone because of looters, so these babies are left by themselves in the middle of the night."

The manager of the hospital, Dr Mouhammed Nasir, says: "Contaminated baby milk and ice-cream are the killers, and children being washed. Just one accidental sip of water can kill a small child."

To find out what is happening in the schools, we go past the burning polytechnic to the ministry of education, which has already been gutted. Seven-year-olds are still scavenging for bits of wire, and the concrete floors are carpeted with old exam papers. One is for an English exam: "Re-write in cursive: The boy pats the dog. The Iraqi army is ready to liberate Palestine."

A group of armed men run in screaming at us. It turns out that they think we are looters. They used to work at the ministry as clerks, and have banded together to save the remnants of their office. Many of the 700 schools in Basra have also been looted. Unicef is trying to deliver as many "schools in a box" as it can - crates packed with paper, pencils, blackboard paint and chalk.

At Yomoma girls' school, a teacher points to the sweating seven-year-olds, and cries: "We have no fans, no milk or water for the children. They are being treated like animals going to market, not pupils receiving an education. We are the second richest oil country in the world, but we have nothing - it is madness."

The Americans are planning to restructure the curriculum but, at the moment, that is merely a matter of tearing out pages. What people need now are water supplies, lavatories, desks and teachers. Each school is operating on two-hour shifts; 25 per cent of children do not receive any education.

The British Army is doing its best. It cannot guard all 700 schools but Sgt Rachel Webster from the Royal Military Police has raised funds to re-decorate Khadiga girls' school, which sits next to the bombed-out ministry of information and the offices of the secret police. She is even equipping it with a library and swings, donated by the troops.

This is a crucial period for the people of Iraq. The aid agencies have just returned. In Basra, the Armed Forces have re-recruited the police; neighbours are beginning to band together to protect their amenities. Workers are trickling back.

It is easy to blame the Iraqis for destroying their own future, but much of the looting has occurred as a result of a long dictatorship and because almost everyone has now lost his or her job. I ask one man why he was carting off paving stones.

"Because Saddam took what was ours, so we are taking it back," he replies. Outside the United Nations office, soldiers hold back more than 1,000 people, clutching their CVs, all screaming for jobs.

Some Iraqis have been extraordinary. At one orphanage, Dr Mohamed Ghali, a former university lecturer in biology, moved in to help protect the boys after looters threw in grenades and ransacked the home. "I am ashamed of what my neighbours have done to this place," he says. He goes begging for the boys' food every morning, and for mattresses.

The agencies' first priority is to get the water and sewage systems working and to provide food and oral rehydration sachets for the most vulnerable. At the same time, they are trying to re-equip the hospitals and to start clearing the mines, cluster bombs and ammunition dumps. The schools are next on the list.

Two of the Unicef workers, from Somalia and Sudan, tell us: "It is even worse than Somalia and Sudan. But this country has the chance of a future, if we can get it right. It is like a rich man who has trashed his palace - at least the plot of land on which we have to build is rich with oil."